SOFTWARE AM RADIO IMPLEMENTATION

Daniel Iancu - John Glossner - Hua Ye - Youssef Abdelilah - Stuart Stanley

   In multimedia multiprotocol communications convergence devices it is desirable to reduce the number of components required. Traditionally, each communication protocol requires a separate baseband processor implemented by discrete components. For a system that would like to support WCDMA, GSM/GPRS, GPS, Bluetooth, AM, FM, and 802.11b, at least five separate chips may be required. The space required on the board by these multiple devices makes small form factor implementations difficult. A desirable alternative to multiple chip implementations is a Software Defined Radio (SDR) approach. In SDR, a single baseband chip is reconfigured such that multiple baseband protocols may execute on the same device. Sandbridge Technologies has designed a platform for reconfigurable software defined radio communications. As part of this project we have implemented an efficient software AM receiver. In our implementation, all functions associated with the AM receiver, including most of the filtering and demodulation are executed in Software (SW) using only two threads of the Sandbridge Sandblaster multithreaded processor core.

Keywords: communication protocol, baseband

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